Forbidden

by R. R. Banks

  We drew in simultaneous breaths, seeming to fill ourselves with each other, and he sank into me. My head fell back and I groaned as my body welcomed him. Even in the short time that we had been apart, it seemed that I had forgotten the way that he felt inside me and my body stretched to hold him. There was a brief moment close to pain and then I felt his hip bones crush against mine, melding us fully. Jude began to roll his hips, keeping our bodies tightly together but still stroking deep inside me. Each push of his hips reminded me of his body and it at once felt like it had been years since he had touched me and like we had never been apart.

  I held him tightly and released myself to him, wanting to experience all of him.

  The evening had softened completely to night by the time I lay beside him, my body humming, my breath still slowing gradually. Around us the room smelled warm and spicy, the scent of our bodies filling my lungs with every draw. My eyes fluttered open and I found Jude gazing at me. My lips curved into a smile.

  "What?" he whispered.

  "You're the one staring at me."

  "You're beautiful."

  I sighed and stretched against the luxuriously soft, smooth sheets.

  "That was our first time in a bed," I murmured.

  "Mmm-hmmm," he said.

  Having Jude make love to me in a bed felt different than any other time. We felt more connected and I realized at that moment that it had impacted me more than I could have expected, even if I didn't fully understand how.

  Jude turned and started to climb out of the bed.

  "Can I ask you something?"

  He glanced over his shoulder at me.

  "I suppose you know that you can because you just did."

  I pulled myself to sit up, pulling the sheets up around me.

  "How did you know that I was a virgin?"

  "What?" he asked.

  "When I told you that I was a virgin, you said that you had suspected it. Why?"

  He turned back toward me and sat down.

  "The way that you carried yourself."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's not that sex changes you or that you immediately look different. But when you become aware of yourself, when you learn more about your body and your desires, when you find out what you like and how to experience it, there is a certain type of confidence that you discover. You didn't seem to have that confidence. You didn't seem secure enough in your own skin."

  As he said it, I realized that he was right. Though it wasn't something that I had been aware of or that I felt as it was happening, I knew that I had gotten more in touch with myself since being with Jude. I thought that I had known my body, that I was familiar with it and what it could do. Learning the pleasure that Jude could provide and what I could offer him, however, was something completely different. I understood my own body and the bodies of others in a new way and knew that I had expressed that through the changes that I had made in my choreography over the last several weeks.

  Jude leaned toward me and kissed me.

  "I'm going to take a shower," he said. "Make yourself at home."

  He disappeared through a door into the attached bathroom and I heard the water turn on. I rested back against the pillows for a few moments, but then my curiosity pulled me out of the bed. I picked up the shirt that Jude had been wearing and dropped it down over my head. It settled over me, bringing with it his spicy smell and the feeling of his skin. The bottom brushed against my thighs as I walked out of the bedroom and started down the hallway.

  Jude had shown me some of the house, but not all of it. I wanted to see more. I wanted to know more about the fortress where he hid away from the world. I roamed through, peering into open rooms and running my fingers along gilded frames and lush details that made each new area of the home that I discovered seem even more opulent.

  Suddenly I found myself in a hallway that wasn't like the rest of the house. It was difficult to describe, but this area of the house seemed different. It felt somehow colder, an air of abandonment giving me a chill as I took my first steps into the corridor. It was as if something was staring at me and I glanced over my shoulder to make sure that I was still alone. When I saw that there was no one behind me, I couldn't tell if I was relieved or disappointed. My curiosity returned and I drew a steeling breath before I continued further down the hallway. The further that I went, the darker the hallway became and I reached out to run my fingers across the walls searching for a light switch. I didn't find one and by the time that I got to the end of the hall, I could barely see. I noticed that there were doors on either side of the hall and I gave one of them an experimental tug. It wouldn't move and I tried the next, but it, too, stayed firm.

  "It's locked."

  I jumped at the sound of Jude's voice and turned to see him standing at the end of the hallway. My heart was pounding in my chest and nervousness flooded through me. I knew that I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't have left the bedroom. He had been so incredibly angry with me just for coming to his house without his permission and the first time that he invites me back and allows me inside, I take it upon myself to start roaming through it. I knew that he was going to be furious. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had forced me to leave right then without even allowing me to change back into my clothes. Instead, he came toward me.

  "I'm sorry," I stumbled.

  In the dim light, it was difficult to see his face. I saw his hand raise and touch the lighting fixture that was above my head. It reminded me of a smaller version of the ones that were in the ballroom. He must have touched a switch because the bulbs in the fixture began to glow, illuminating his face. Rather than being one of fury, his expression was calm.

  "Did you get lost?" he asked.

  I started to nod, but stopped myself. There was no reason to lie to him. I knew that he would know I wasn't telling the truth and it would only make me feel worse.

  "No," I admitted. "I was curious."

  He nodded and I could almost see the thoughts that were running through his mind. He reached up for the light fixture again and I saw him move a piece of it aside to reveal a hidden compartment. His fingertips dipped into the compartment and he withdrew a small key. I watched him as he stepped up to the first door that I had tried to open and put the key into the lock. The lock released with a deep click and he turned the knob to open the door. Without saying anything, he stepped out of the way. I looked at him for a few seconds and then walked up beside him to look through the doorway. Ahead of me was a bedroom. It seemed pristine when I first looked inside, but the longer that I stared at it, the more that I began to notice how old it really was. Jude reached around me to touch the light switch just inside the door and an overhead light ensconced in milky green glass added to the illumination from the light fixture in the hallway.

  The new light touched surfaces covered in a fine film of dust for years. A perfectly made bed stood against one wall, pillows and bedding that had once been plush now flattened from the pressure of time. There was a delicate, subtle femininity about the room that made it completely different from the bedroom that I had just been in with Jude. Even under the dust, I could see that the room was beautiful.

  "This was the bedroom that I shared with my wife,” Jude said.

  His voice was soft and filled with an emotion and nostalgia that I wouldn't have expected from him. I was startled at the revelation and that he had been so willing to show this to me. I looked at him, unsure of what to say. I almost felt as though I could still sense the woman's presence in the room and I stepped away from it.

  "Why is it still here?" I asked.

  "I haven't been in it in nineteen years," he said. "It is exactly the way that it was the last time that she walked out of it."

  I glanced toward the room again and noticed new details about it. I could see a watch sitting on the dresser and the tips of a pair of shoes peeking out from behind the chest that was sitting at the end of the bed. A pair of dark pants lay folded and draped over the back of a chair
in the corner as if just taken off or waiting to be put on. I realized that I was looking at a crystallized moment in Jude's life. This room was a frozen, untouched testament to the last seconds that Jude lived before he realized that the life that he knew was over. Though I knew nothing about it, I could feel that the man who had stepped into this room was not the one who stepped out of it.

  "That's why you have a different bedroom," I said.

  "I couldn't bring myself to sleep here again."

  I had so many questions that I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to know, but I didn't know how to form them. Finally, I lifted my hand toward the other locked door that I had tried to open.

  "What's in there?" I asked.

  The calm expression on Jude's face darkened slightly and he reached into the bedroom to turn off the light. He didn't hesitate, didn't glance into the room again before he shut the door and used the small key to lock it. He walked over to the other door and reached up to another of the light fixtures. Just as with the first, he opened a small compartment in it that would have gone unnoticed by any who didn't know that it was there. He withdrew another key and stepped up to the door. I noticed that he hesitated more here than he did in front of the first door. He took a breath and inserted the key into the lock. It opened more quietly than the first and he slowly pushed the door open. He touched the wall on the inside and I saw the light turn on in the room before I walked up to his side. I looked into the room and my hand flew to my mouth, covering it to muffle the gasp that accompanied stinging tears that formed in my eyes when they saw the still, time-faded nursery beyond.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jude

  I didn't look into the nursery but out of the corner of my eye, I could see Veronica's expression as her eyes scanned it. I knew every detail of that room. I knew exactly what she was seeing as her eyes swept slowly over the space kept tightly protected from the world outside by blue and white curtains closed across the curved picture window that had once been my favorite feature of the room. I knew that she was seeing the crib that I had chosen and put together, the mobile hanging still over it. The changing table ready against the wall, piles of diapers with decades-old labels already in place on the shelf beneath the cushioned platform. The rocking chair positioned in the corner that had only ever rocked a child that was still curled safely within the belly of his mother. The shelves nearby.

  Of course, there were books in this room. Books were the first thing that I had bought for him. Now those books were sitting on the shelf next to the rocking chair, so many of them with their pages never turned. Their stories have been intended for him and they were still locked inside, never heard, never read.

  I knew that she could see the closet door on the far wall. Beyond that door, where she couldn't see, was filled with a wardrobe meticulously chosen in shades of cream and yellow and green. A sprinkling of blue for the hopes of a baby boy. Hints of pink in case of a princess. We didn't know which our baby would be.

  Veronica looked back at me and I could see the pain etched on her face. She hurt for me even though she didn't understand what she was seeing. Still keeping my eyes averted, I reached into the nursery and turned the light off, closing the door and locking it as I had the bedroom. I tucked the key away in the compartment that I had designed into the light fixtures and reached for Veronica's hand. It felt strange, foreign in mine when I first touched it, but I held on. I didn't let the first compulsion that hit me cause me to let it go and walk away from her. Instead, I tightened my fingers around it and walked out of the hallway and back into the light of the rest of the house. I brought her back into the bedroom where I had set up fresh cups of coffee and another slice of the rich, creamy cake the cook had made for us. I had gone to get them when I got out of the shower and realized that she wasn't in the bedroom, but my taste for the dessert was gone now.

  I sat down on the end of the bed and picked up one of the cups of coffee, swallowing a bitter mouthful as Veronica curled into a chair positioned opposite me. The air in the room was warm, but she reached out for the blanket that was draped across the back of the chair and wrapped herself in it before picking up her own cup. She glanced up at me over the white rim of the mug, then back down. I knew that she wanted more, but she didn't want to ask. It was up to me to offer it to her.

  "My mother died when I was just a baby," I started. "But I didn't have much of a relationship with my father when I was growing up. I decided when I was still young that that wasn't going to be the type of life that I was going to have. I met my wife when I was a teenager. She was the first girl who I couldn't take my eyes away from. When I looked at her, it was like there was nothing else in the world. I knew from pictures that my father used to be with my mother all the time and he always looked so happy. I figured that she had to be able to make him think about nothing else for him to spend so much time with her. That meant that what I was feeling was love."

  "Was it?"

  I gave a short laugh.

  "No." I shook my head, looking down at that dark coffee. "I barely knew her when I married her. But it became love." I looked back at Veronica. "It became a consuming type of love that was something I never knew could exist but knew I needed as soon as I felt it. We lived here after the wedding and this house became our entire world. In those early days, there was so much that we needed to find out about each other and learn about being married that we were all each other needed. After we learned each other, we didn't need anything else."

  "Were you a professor then?" she asked.

  "No. I hadn't started teaching yet. Actually, I didn't work."

  "You didn't?"

  She sounded shocked, but I couldn't blame her. She knew the side of me that was lost in my work, not the side that didn't want to waste a drop of sunlight or a moment of the stars on anything but living.

  "No, I didn't. My father did everything he could to instill a really strong work ethic in me. Just like his father had done for him and his father had done before him, I was introduced into the workforce when I was still really young and it was made really clear to me that I wouldn't be able to inherit the estate unless I had put in what he considered a sufficient amount of work. I learned the family business and a few other things as well just to fill those days."

  Veronica gave an unexpected giggle and I looked at her strangely.

  "What's funny?" I asked.

  "I just never thought of you as one of the privileged rich boys who didn't think that they should have to do anything."

  "I don't," I said. "That's really not the case at all. I appreciate what my father did. I'm glad that he didn't just hand me everything. I knew that I had all this waiting for me, but what if I didn't? What if something had happened and all of it was just gone by the time that I was an adult? At least I would know how to find my footing again."

  "Then I'm confused," she said.

  "Just because I'm glad that I knew how to work doesn't mean that I wanted to. There's so much of life and I wanted all of it. I wanted to be able to see every moment of every day as mine. When I worked, such a big part of every day was carved out to belong to other people. They told me what to do and what to think and what to plan for the next minute. They made sure that I didn't have the opportunity to just be. And that's what I wanted. I just wanted to be. I guess you can't really understand that."

  "I think I might understand more than you think I do," she said.

  I nodded.

  "So as soon as I had worked as much as my father said that I had to, I stopped. I already had everything that I needed and I had made connections that would ensure my family's empire continued to build even without me being directly involved in it. I had found Ellery by then and instead of just wanting my moments to belong to me, I wanted them to belong to her too. Every day I could come up with more to do than I had minutes to do it in, and she taught me that sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all. Sometimes we would leave in the middle of the night and go on adventures and not com
e back until we felt like it. Other days we would do nothing but lie on the ground in the garden and feel the movement of the sun across the sky and try to sense the change in the way that the air smelled from the morning to the night. Ellery always would say then when things changed, they changed in an instant. Even when it seems gradual, it wasn't really. There would be one second when it was one way and then the next it was different. That meant that when you breathe, you had to breathe that breath like it was the only one you had because there would never be another one like it. When you breathed out, the world would be different than when you had drawn that air in. I tried to live my life that way."

  "What happened?" she asked. "When did it change?"

  "For a while, we were everything to each other and couldn't imagine anything that could be better. Then we started thinking that there might be more. I started thinking about my father and even though we hadn't had much of a relationship and he hadn't been anything like the parents that Ellery had, the older that I got, the more that I understood him and appreciated the role that he had had in my life. At the same time, I knew that I wanted to do things differently. We started talking about having a family and how incredible it would be to be able to see the world fresh and new again. We had already done so much. We had already experienced so much. The next adventure could be to do and see it all again through the eyes of a new life, then to do and to see even more. It didn't take long and when I found out that Ellery was pregnant... I can't even describe what it was like. I had thought about it so much and wanted it so much, and suddenly it was there. I was so in awe of her. She was standing there in front of me and she didn't look any different, but she was holding on to this incredible little secret. There was a new person within her, a person that only she knew then. That sense of amazement only grew the longer the baby did. She got rounder and I got more astonished. It was like suddenly I was the child and had totally forgotten where babies come from."